Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some
and not others? The musical theatre repertory is not composed of
titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast
recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube.
The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to
hear when they attend a production, are defined by media consumed
at home more than by memories of performances witnessed in the
theatre. For example, author Doug Reside shows that it is no
accident that the serious book musical with a fixed score developed
in the 1940s - when commercially pressed and marketed record albums
made it possible to record most of the score of a new musical in a
fixed medium. And Hamilton, a musical with dense lyrics and
revolutionary musical style, would not have been as easily
accessible to world audiences if most hadn't already had the
opportunity to learn the score by listening to free digital streams
of the original cast recording. The technologies that made these
media possible developed concurrently with and shaped the American
musical as an art form. Reside uncovers how the affordances and
limitations of these technologies established a repertory of titles
that are most frequently performed and defined by the texts used in
these performances. Fixing the Musical argues that the musicals we
most remember are those which most effectively used their era's
best recording and distribution technologies to document and share
the work with those who would never see the original production on
Broadway.
General
Imprint: |
Oxford UniversityPress
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
Authors: |
Douglas L. Reside
(Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator)
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 156mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
192 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-19-007372-5 |
Categories: |
Books
Promotions
|
LSN: |
0-19-007372-1 |
Barcode: |
9780190073725 |
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